AtD on the Aether--non-Aether bit, pp.58-63

[Mark Kohut]

pp.58 ff....This 'scientifific' question---solved by the Michelson-Morley experiments---
is presented as a satire on religious belief including 'faith' and working in a 
satire of Buddhist 'philosophical' sophistry p. 63....
 
Re the Aetherists argument: If we can explain everything without it, then why keep it?
said Roswell....(who had only been in the loony bin a couple of days).....the
positivist, Occam's razor position............
 
"Unless", Ed pointed out, it IS God"....."akasa, the ground or basis of all that 
exists" is the referent......So, Pynchon profound ambiguity here? 
 
Aetherists--nonAetherists .."always been a religious question"......othere are a couple-three other times
when something is presented as a substitute for religion in this first section.....
used of Merle and Webb about their substitues for same....."closest he ever got
to church-going"...etc.......
 
Whatever are TRP's spiritual concerns later, ultimately [see above on akasa] in AtD...it seems clear that in 
Light Across the Ranges he wants to ground many of his leading characters,
vessels of his vision, it seems, in a world without Western religion, without 
religion at all, it seems, but with substitutes for. The way we live now in our secular age, say many, 
 so to extrapolate. 
 
A--and, on the theme of grounded anti-bloviation, couple-three times TRP
scores the talkers for being ununderstandable......twice his simple folk
describe high-level abstract talk as 'like [hearing] Chinese"....and Chandrasekar p.63,
the abstract Buddhist thinker, "didn't say much but when he did no one could
figure out what he meant". 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120214/0e081910/attachment.html>